so excited by this... moved here from Manchester 5 years ago, confident in the fact that they seemed to stop by at the Corn Exchange on pretty much each tour (heck, half of No Manifesto seemed to be filmed there from what i recall).

over those 5 years since: nothing. had to do Manc for the RTF tour, London for the Holy Bible, skipped the EMG dates, back up to Manc for RiF.

now finally - FINALLY - they are back on my (near) doorstep and i don't have to faff with trains / hotels to catch them. happy days.

Got a few decent photos last night... can't for the life of me work out how to host them to post any here, so I'll pass them over to the FD Twitter in a sec.

Gig was... alright - I still think it's an odd album to perform in full, and once they got the familiar big singles out the way and hit that run of My Little Empire, I'm Not Working, etc, I think the band were almost questioning their decision to do it too.

Lack of Nobody Loved You was disappointing; also think Masses should've been included, as still see that as part of that era too. Personally, after Black Dog I'd have gone for NLY / SYMM / Tolerate / Prologue / Masses to transition into the 'hits' set...

While it was nice to hear a fair bit beyond the usual festival / greatest hits type set, I just felt the band's energy and commitment to the task sagged a little, especially in comparison to the Holy Bible shows.

Don't get me wrong, there were definite highlights - Born A Girl was beautiful, JDB added in some welcome little roughness over the top of My Little Empire, and the whistling on Tender & Tired worked so much better as a guitar solo.

In all, I'm glad I went... but also glad to only do one date of this particular tour!

Rest of the set shot by; was so expecting Motorcycle or International Blue to kickstart the second half that I didn't even register the intro to Sleepflower for a good few seconds!

oh yeah, and to the women that pushed to the front soon as Gwenno finished and immediately started slagging her off ("that's the worst band I've ever seen" / "whoever chose that must be deaf") - what is it about a Welsh girl dressed as a druid singing in Cornish about wanting cheese that you didn't enjoy?!